In the process of restoring the cathedral and looking at the room brushes used in this mission, I made a strange discovery:
It became apparent that the mission designers must have made a conscious decision to allow the player to use the 'quick way out' method.
Which is strange, since they tried to fix it by increasing the cathedral door weight, and yet they still left the escape via StYoras option open.

Lytha

7th Aug 2002, 23:27

I guess they didn't want to update the room database; and from what I heard, the roombrushing of the outside of the cathedral was a major pain in the first place. Doing it again, but with a different room type, was most probably not what they really wanted to do.

Zaccheus

8th Aug 2002, 08:39

Hmm - good point.

I have had to move/resize a few of those room brushes and yes that area is a pain.

Which still leaves the question why they did it in the first place.

I wonder if this might be the case:
When they started making the mission, the player had to get back to the starting point. At some point they changed the final objective (use the cloister gate instead) and they didn't want to redo the room brushes.

Lytha

8th Aug 2002, 09:41

It's a mission by Randy, and he was always player-friendly enough to imagine and to allow different ways than the usual methods to solve a puzzle or a task.

Look at Training; the sparring area.

You can solve it as the Keeper tells you (whack the poor Guard into oblivion), or in the other way (stand there and let the Guard whack <i>you</i> into oblivion.) Maybe there's even some timelimit for this task, so that it would be possible to solve it by running a few hours around the Guard (making him dizzy until oblivion)

Look at Training; the red door of the sparring area.

If you can manage to get through the door (I have still no idea how I did it), you can skip the entire weapon training, and the next tasks will just pop up as usual. No wicked "mission fails because you broke my chain of events" by the mission creator here.

Look at the Bank; the time-lock of the Vault

As far as I know, he implemented that the Vault door (it's a timelock) will be unlocked after 8 hours, so you can solve this mission by sitting in a corner and taking a nap.

Well... RTC is just another example of this method of "lets give the player some alternatives to chose from" - I am pretty much sure that it was not Randy's decision to "fix" the Cathedral-Door shortcut.

I am also relatively... -- no, 100% -- sure that Randy was aware of the shortcut via the roof of the Cathedral, and also of the way to end the mission via the roof (if necessary, then over the wall of the front entrance area, why else wouldn't he have blocked the way from here to the normal exit area.

It's just the way he designes missions. It's the reason for why I enjoy missions by him a lot. :)